The Reasons of Europe: Edmund Husserl, Jan Patočka, and María Zambrano on the Spiritual Heritage of Europe. In: History of European Ideas, 44(5) 2018, 1-12. (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Idea of Europe in Husserl's Phenomenology
2013
In contemporary debates, the concept of Europe is most often discussed and defined in terms of a geographical, cultural, political, or even as an economic entity. This dissertation aims at reinstituting the philosophical relevance of this concept by articulating a novel understanding of one of its guiding intellectual motives: the idea of universalism. Against the typically modern understanding of this idea - most evident in the violent and unilateral history of European expansionism - this work provides a new formulation of this idea as a necessarily pluralistic and self-critical category of historical and intercultural reflection. This work has its methodological and conceptual background in the philosophical work of Edmund Husserl (1859 - 1938). Late in his career, Husserl - the founder of modern phenomenology - composed a series of essays and lectures discussing the topic of Europe, its philosophical idea and teleological history. These texts, which had their imminent background in the devastating experience of the First World War (1914 - 1918) and the consequent political turmoil of the Weimar Republic, took their point of departure from the overall cultural crisis of European humanity, which seemed to lose its confidence in the founding ideas of modernity, most importantly, in the ideas of universal reason and progress that structure the domains of scientific and political activity. The argument of this work is based on an interpretation according to which Husserl s late reflections on Europe should not be treated as mere analyses of contemporary criticism, but as serious phenomenological reflections on the particular topics of generativity and historicity, that is, those forms of meaning-creation that take place in interpersonal, intergenerational and geo-historical processes of co-operation. Through his reflections on Europe, it is argued, Husserl reformulated his phenomenological project in order to account for its intersubjective, historical and normative dimensions. In the light of the phenomenological analysis, the idea of Europe appears as a specific task of renewal and critique. This task, which has its origin in the birth of Greek philosophy, is corresponded by specific forms of intersubjectivity and historicity. As a result, the dissertation provides a new constructive interpretation on some of the key concepts of modern philosophy of history. Against the postmodern critique on the impossibility of the teleological view of history - the end of grand narratives - the work defends the ideas of crisis, teleology and universal history as inalienable tools of philosophical reflection and critique.
Europe, Phenomenology, and Politics in Husserl and Patočka
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The Subject(s) of Phenomenology
This paper investigates phenomenological philosophy as the critical consciousness of modernity beginning from that point in the Vienna Lecture where Husserl discounts Papuans and Gypsies, and includes America, in defining Europe as the spiritual home of reason. Its meaning is analyzed through the introduction of the concept of institution (Urstiftung) in Crisis to argue that the historical fact of encounter with America can be seen as an event for reason insofar as the encounter includes elements previously absent in the European entelechy. The conclusion shows that phenomenology must become a comparative, Socratic, diagnosis of the planetary crisis of reason. The entelechy of reason that becomes evident through the concept of institution should be understood less as a renewal of a pre-existing tradition than as an exogenic encounter and incursion of an outside that together define an instituting event as new in relation to its tradition.
Husserl Studies, 2020
Timo Miettinen, Husserl and the Idea of Europe, Northwestern University Press, Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, 2020, 245 pp, ISBN 9780810141483. Esteban Marín-Ávila This book offers much more than what the title might suggest, at least to some non-European readers. With abundant erudition, Timo Miettinen contextualizes some of the core ethical and political ideas of Husserl's latter works, especially-but not only-The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology and the texts closely associated with it and published in Husserliana VI, such as the Prague and the Vienna Lectures. These core ethical and political ideas are situated in relation to their early development in Husserl's works but also, and more importantly, in relation to the intellectual debates of the time when they were written and to the history of philosophy as a whole, in particular to those moments in which Husserl identified the irruption and renewals of this history: Greek and modern philosophy. With this, Miettinen sheds new light on Husserl's original contributions to the areas of ethics and politics.
The Particular Universal: Europe in Modern Philosophies of History
Europe is understood most often in terms of a geographical, cultural, historical or a political-economic entity. This article aims at rediscovering the philosophical sense of this notion by situating it into the modern tradition of the philosophy of history. Through this tradition, Europe became one of the central platforms in which the historical framework was put to the test – where the ideas of progress and decline acquired their concrete character. Most importantly, Europe became the central platform for the idea of universalism as the gradual dissolution of cultural limits and the triumph of an egalitarian community of human beings. Instead of simply acting as the sole representative of this universality, I argue, Europe became the mediator between the particular and the universal – it was the answer to the question, to which extent can a particular being represent an idea of universal reason, freedom or cosmopolitanism. Following this line of interpretation on the basis of Husserlian phenomenology, I argue that if Europe is to be conceived of in terms of a philosophical idea, it should not be conceived of as a metaphysical essence but as a dynamic process of temporal development.
Ovidiu STANCIU, Europe and the Oblivion of the World. From Husserl to Patocka
Thinking After Europe. Jan Patocka and Politics, F. Tava and D. Meacham (eds.), London: Rowman&Littlefield, p. 315-329, 2016
In the 6th paragraph of the Krisis, Husserl bemoans that an engherzige Vernunft (“a narrow-minded reason”, or literally a “small-hearted reason”) has established a monopole over the meaning of reason, reducing it to its technical significance and plunging the humanity that lives according to it (that is, the European humanity in a larger sense) into a drastic dismay. The remedy to this situation does not lie in a relinquishment to reason as such, but rather in the rediscovery of a grossherzige Vernunft, a reason capable not only in advancing from a discursive sequence to another, but equally able to give an account of its own emergence. The radical account he gives on the crisis of the “European humanity” leads Husserl to question the appearance of reason as such as well as its ambiguous relation to the world-life that precedes it. The way Husserl envisages to surpass the “technical” (that is engherzige) sense of reason is through a Ruckfrage (question-in-return), that aims to grasp and therefore to re-actualize the emergence of reason out of a world that does not include it. The European crisis is therefore a crisis of its reason: a reflective relapse to its origins appears to be the only way out. The purpose of our enquiry is to lay out Jan Patocka’s criticism of this Husserlian position. The core of his argument can be summarized as follows : not only had Husserl maintained a restricted meaning of reason in as much as he relates it solely to the achievements of science, but the concept of world he puts forward is also biased by his subjectivistic position. For Patocka, the main consequence of Husserl’s characterization of science as the only field where reason (even in its grossherzige meaning) can be deployed is the adhesion to a refined form of Euro-centrism: as if, “the ideal of the European ratio represents the universal entelechy of humanity” . The underlying assumption of this thesis is the conviction that the depth of the world cannot emerge unless it is captured in a process of idealisation, unless it is related to a subjective form of infinitisation. Quite the contrary, for Patocka, “the mystery of the world can shine wherever life, in its simplicity and inexhaustibility arises” . It is this enlarged sense of the world that makes possible not only to reactivate the “forgotten traditions” , but also to shape a sense of reason that encompasses also its scientific meaning. The criticism Patocka addresses to Husserl’s idea of Europe doesn’t lead him to reject the very idea of Europe. Quite the contrary: “Europe has drawn two paths towards the opening of our planet: the exterior path of conquest and of universal hegemony, which has lead to its wreck as a historical reality; but also the interior path of the opening of the world, of becoming-world of the different Lebenwelten. The latter path needs to be today rediscovered and followed up to its end” . It is also through following this path that we can give an account of the Patockian idea of a “post-European humanity”.
For the Sake of the Shared World: Husserl and the limits of Europe
Philosophy today, 2010
This presentation examines the problem of cultural transformationparticularly the problem of modern Westernization -in the framework of Husserlian phenomenology. By focusing on the concept of limit in Husserl's late manuscripts, the presentation illustrates how cultures are conceived with regard to a twofold liminal structure: territoriality and teleology. However, within the birth of Greek philosophy, Husserl detects a radical alteration in the fundamental sense of both of these structures, which will be described as the deconstruction and delimitation of cultural limits. By elaborating this dynamism of cultural transformation, the presentation will answer some of the critiques of Husserl's alleged Euro-centrism.